Crickets: The Best of the Fading Captain Series 1999 - 2007

Fading Captain;
2007

Find it at:

If you've clicked here, you know Robert
Pollard has written many songs. However, discontinuing the Fading
Captain series (just to start another vanity label, Prom Is Coming)
begs for some kind of benchmark tallying, so let's crunch a few
numbers: Crickets compiles material from some 20 albums (and a
smattering of compilations, singles, and EPs), many of which were
released as Pollard was recording, writing, and touring with Guided by
Voices. Just how many songs that amounts to from Fading Captain #1
(1999's Kid Marine) until now is hard to calculate, though if
you're curious, he's registered 926 songs with BMI, and the
exhaustive and very helpful gbvdb.com lists the grand total of those
which were ever released at 1,242 (13 are cover versions). Starting
with the first Guided by Voices album (1987's Devil Between My
Toes), that's putting out forty to sixty songs a year. Just going
on the hours it took me to finish this review, relatively speaking, I
am a failure in life.

But here's some simpler math: The long
and storied career of Pollard's best-known and best-loved band was
expertly distilled down to the near-perfect compilation Human
Amusements at Hourly Rates by Pollard himself, and it all fit on
just one disc. Crickets is two. I assume Fading Captain
requires twice the space because... actually, I have no idea. Because
they had to fit that seventh Circus Devils track on? They had to
include the a track from the painfully forgettable soundtrack to
Bubble? Sure, Fading Captain releases were often spotty, but
there were always one or two gems on even the least essential records
that should really sustain an album's worth of consistent listening.
I can barely make it through the first disc.

Crickets does the listener the
favor of "rescuing" certain tracks from albums which didn't live
up to their finest moments, like the impatient and blistering bile of
the Circus Devils' "Bull Spears", or "Sensational Gravity Boy"
from the completist-baiting Briefcase compilation, an abridged
version of GbV's first four-disc Suitcase box with a few extra
unreleased tracks tucked in. But as with almost any compilation, there are songs that should have been rescued that weren't, which is
especially frustrating given how much mediocre material they did
choose. Omitting "I Drove a Tank" is a serious head-scratcher, a
GbV live staple that towers over the other Soft Rock Renegades
material included here. Same with "Circle of Trim" when compared
to the middling "Feathering Clueless (The Exotic Freebird)" from the first Airport 5
album with former GbV guitarist Tobin Sprout, or taking two tracks from the Motel of Fools mini-album and somehow neglecting "Red Ink Superman".

Still, prolific as he was, no one should be treated as a human
jukebox. One of the small, unexpectedly rewarding pleasures of the
Fading Captain series was hearing Pollard try to fit himself into new
contexts. Free of the sifting necessary on the albums, many of those
tracks shine here, like the surprisingly chipper "Soldiers of June"
snatched from the more keyboard-based and often creepy ambiance of
the Circus Devils, or breezier, gentle songs like The Takeovers'
"Island of Lost Lucys" or Pollard's "Zoom (It Happens All Over
the World)", recorded with Doug Gillard mere months after GbV
played their final show. Moreover, each disc ends with three
heretofore unreleased songs, but aside from naming one of them "I'm
Gonna Miss My Horse", none of them are very memorable. To be
completely fair (maybe fairer than much of this material deserves), a
back-to-back parade of hits would be misrepresenting what Fading
Captain was all about.

With its thoughtful, charming packaging, stuffed with photos
collages and compiling album artwork for every last Fading Captain
release, Crickets is more like one of the monolithic GbV
Suitcase sets than a best-of, just half as long and with a
(slightly) better hit-or-miss ratio. The easy thing to say would be
that this is a great introduction to material that's as strong as
Pollard's former day job, and that might be half true. His earliest
solo material for Matador is as strong as anything Guided By Voices
ever put out, and under the umbrella of Fading Captain, Lexo and the
Leapers' Ask Them ranks with Pollard's finest work, as does Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department and even the
first Airport 5 record. Crickets, however, lacks adequate bait
for completists and will confuse and likely put off neophytes. It's
simply cleaning house.